Hermeneutical Injustice and the Problem of Authority

Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3 (3):1-23 (2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Miranda Fricker identifies a wrong she calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’. A culture’s hermeneutical resources are the shared meanings its members use to understand their experience, and communicate this understanding to others. Cultures tend to be composed of different social groups that are organised hierarchically. As a consequence of these uneven power relations, the culture’s shared meanings often reflect the lives of its more powerful members, and fail to properly capture the experiences of the less powerful. This may result in members of less powerful groups being harmed. Such disadvantage constitutes, for Fricker, hermeneutical injustice. In this paper, I discuss a problem for Fricker, which arises when we consider what is required to remedy a hermeneutical wrong. Fricker characterizes hermeneutical injustice as involving a lack of concepts, on the part of the disadvantaged group, to capture some important aspect of their experience. But what has not been properly appreciated in the literature to date, is that it is really competing views of the world that are at stake. Moreover, Fricker’s account seemingly implies that the disadvantaged group’s understanding of the world should be treated as authoritative, and taken up by the wider culture. The worry is that in some cases, the disadvantaged group’s view of the world is not one that we think should be accepted. Having presented this problem, I will then show that it bears some similarities to another debate: the dispute over feminist critiques of alien cultural practices. I will then argue that lessons drawn from the latter can help overcome the problem of authority in Fricker’s case.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 99,210

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-10-11

Downloads
147 (#138,617)

6 months
18 (#144,202)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
University of Sheffield

Citations of this work

Overcoming Hermeneutical Injustice in Mental Health: A Role for Critical Phenomenology.Rosa Ritunnano - 2022 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53 (3):243-260.
Telling the Stories of Others.Nadia Mehdi - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
Whose Hermeneutical Marginalization?Nick Clanchy - 2023 - Episteme 20 (3):813-832.

View all 6 citations / Add more citations